standalone_vta

A maintained, unified, and extended Versatile Tensor Accelerator (VTA) ecosystem.

Overview

This repository addresses the limitations of the original VTA project by providing:

• Active Maintenance: An up-to-date and maintained VTA codebase.
• Unified Simulation: A consistent input format (raw binary files) for both functional (C++) and cycle-accurate (CHISEL) simulators.
• Extended Cycle-Accurate Simulation: Enriched cycle-accurate simulation with multiple test cases for different submodules.
• Standalone Compiler: An open-source, TVM-independent compiler for generating VTA binaries.

This project aims to improve the VTA's usability and applicability, particularly in safety-critical systems like aeronautics. The VTA is an open-source hardware accelerator designed to efficiently execute matrix multiplications, a core operation in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).

Repository Structure

• compiler/: Contains the standalone VTA compiler, data definition, and operation definition tools.
  • data_definition/: Tools for generating binary data to be executed by the VTA.
  • operations_definition/: Tools for generating VTA instructions.
• simulators/: Contains the VTA simulators.
  • functional_simulator/: A C++ simulator that models the functional behaviour of the VTA.
  • cycle_accurate_simulator/: A cycle-accurate hardware description using CHISEL, along with simulation testbenches.
    • src/main/scala/core/: The hardware description of the VTA.
    • src/test/scala/simulator/: The cycle-accurate simulator with different level of simulation (e.g., TensorAlu, Compute module, TensorGemm). The cycle-accurate simulator uses JSON files located in src/test/scala/resources/.
    • src/test/scala/formal/: The formal verification of the VTA hardware description using chiseltest.
• Makefile: To execute examples including compilation and simulation. The command make list give the list of the possible filename, then make FILENAME=<filename> enables to run an example. For example:

  make FILENAME=lenet5_layer1
  

  The result of the execution will be stored in simulators_output/ and named fsim_report.txt.

Getting Started

To get started with this repository, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/onera/standalone-vta.git
   cd standalone_vta
   

2. Explore the subprojects: Refer to the individual README.md files within each subdirectory (compiler/, simulators/) for detailed instructions on building, running, and using the specific tools and simulators.